Page 50 of Knocked Up

I did not ask for it back.

My phone went off against my hip.

Violet: well. the not knowing is doing something to my body

I typed: He knows.

Violet: he knows! okay. I am calm. I am composing something and I want you to know it will have a border on it. is he still in the building? don’t answer that I can see the truck

"That's Violet," I said.

"She's in the lot."

"She's been in the lot for an hour."

"I know," Beckett said. "She had her headlights on me the whole way in."

We stood there. Bear got up off his feet and stretched his back end in stages. He went and leaned on me, because he had no discretion at all.

"I'll go," Beckett said.

He got as far as the door and stopped. I braced.

"The nineteenth," he said. "Two-fifteen. You don't have to answer tonight."

"I know."

"That's all," he said, and went.

Violet made me go and eat. Then she admitted she was too emotionally compromised to drive. So I drove her car. That is how I came to be at Federal and Alameda with a bag of food in the footwell and a friend narrating destiny in the passenger seat.

I ran the list on the way back. I was very good at the list.

There is a deadline and nothing in his contract that stops it. He has already left once, and he had a good reason. A man with one good reason will find another. His father describes his son's failures for money. There is a lease renewing in August. I've inventoried the room personally, at three in the morning, and there is none.

And at the light at Twenty-Sixth, for as long as it stayed red, I let myself see it.

A dim room and a screen. A very large man in a chair that is too small for him, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, not saying anything.

Then it went green, and I said, "No," out loud.

"No what?" Violet said.

"Nothing."

"Tessa Anne."

"I'm driving," I said.

Chapter 14: Beckett

I sat in her lot that Thursday night with my hands on the wheel and did not turn the key. What I felt first was so big I could not find the edges of it. I've won two playoff series. It was not that.

And underneath it, arriving in the same second, was the other thing.

Because I know what a father is. I have one. I got in a car at nine years old and got thirty minutes of the truth on the drive home. By the time we pulled in I knew to the dollar what I had been worth that week. The man was never once unkind about it. That is a system, and systems get passed down. I fold my shirts to the same width. I keep a list.

And now there is going to be a person. I'm going to be the man in the car.